Do you know which scanner they did this transfer on? The Muller is not bad, but not top of the line either. The Workprinter is a pretty low-end transfer setup and I wouldn't expect great results with that, since it's basically shooting into a consumer/prosumer camcorder, and the quality will largely be determined by the quality of that camera.

1.) it was filmed by a highly trained and experienced cinematographer. Jose is about as good as it gets.

2.) it was denoised/regrained using Neat Video

3.) it was very lightly sharppened.

4.) vision3 50d may very well be the best super 8 film stock ever

5.) that's a high quality Beaulieu camera with some high quality lenses.

6.) it's a great scanner at Ochopico but it has its issues. It looks great, yes, but does not deal well with super 8 jitter because it uses a line ccd sensor. You will get occasional odd effects or warping and jumping in frames as the scanner gets confused by the frame instability. You see this in spirit scans in super 8 at well.

The good news is that unless your exposure was way off, you can always re-scan the film on different machines for better results.

Keep in mind that when you are putting these up on the web, few compression schemes can handle film grain very well, especially those employed by YouTube and Vimeo. By reducing the grain with Neat Video you will get a better, less blocky compression from online services but it can kill the feel of your film so use it sparingly. It's a tradeoff. Too bad ProRes HQ isn't a practical streaming format.

I really don't like that footage. The cinematography is great, yes, but the denoising ruins it for my taste, why should in S8 and then digitally remove some of its inherent qualities, beats me why you would do that

I really don't like that footage. The cinematography is great, yes, but the denoising ruins it for my taste, why should in S8 and then digitally remove some of its inherent qualities, beats me why you would do that

One of the better reasons for denoising is to ensure digital delivery is more efficient. For all it's usefulness in image mediation, (particularly in film projection) noise/grain interferes with the efficiency of digital compression. A typical compressor can end up transforming a beautifully grainy original into something quite ugly. In other words the purpose of the denoiser is not to remove noise per se, but to help the compressor come up with a better end result than if one hadn't applied denoising. A compressor could in principle have a built in denoiser but the art of denoising involves a lot of fine tuning, deserving a system in it's own right for dealing with such.

In this context, where one has greater bandwidth to play with, the less denoising you would then require. In the case of projecting film, no denoising would be required at all, since the bandwidth of film is incredibly massive.

That all said, many often do over-apply denoising, as if noise/grain itself were the problem being addressed. As if the grain in an otherwise beautifully grainy image were some sort of faulty component of the image.

But many, equally do not. They are forced (so to speak) into removing some of the grain. It is a sacrifice they make rather than something they want. The least they can get away with removing, the happier they would be.